Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.

unlikenesses's avatar

Hosting with Fasthosts (sorry...)

I'm trying to host my Laravel 5.1 site on Fasthosts (PHP 5.6), with the end URL hopefully being a subfolder (i.e. www.domain.com/project/).

I have uploaded my files to a folder on the same level as htdocs (including vendor folder and .env). I have set the permissions of the storage folder to 0777. I have created a folder in htdocs called "project" and put the contents of the Laravel public folder in there. I have updated the index.php file to point to the core folder.

In my .htaccess file, I have tried various combinations of including and excluding RewriteBase /, RewriteBase /project/, RewriteRule ^ index.php, and RewriteRule ^ /index.php.

In all cases, when I navigate to www.domain.com/project/, all I get is a 500 server error. Does anyone have any suggestions please?

0 likes
9 replies
unlikenesses's avatar

Thanks Snapey -- your article was in fact one of the guides I used. I already have the app key in my .env file, and the file paths are already fixed (I mentioned this last point in my original post). As far as I know I've followed the instructions of most of the guides I've read to a tee. (Thanks for the catch re. 5.6 -- I've edited my question to fix that.) Any more ideas from anyone?

Snapey's avatar

do you have errors turned on in your .env

at least you are getting an error code. Most of my first deploys are just white screen !

unlikenesses's avatar

Yes I have APP_DEBUG=true in my .env file. But this error is coming direct from the server, not from Laravel...

Snapey's avatar

what do you get from your site.com/project/index.php remembering that your index is not in the root?

is there a specific reason for the /project folder?

unlikenesses's avatar

I get the same error. I'm putting it in a subfolder because it's currently running on a test server that already has other stuff in the root.

Snapey's avatar

so you get a 500 error. I'm assuming this does not have the laravel crash dump? is there any sign that the error is thrown by laravel?

Do you have an htaccess file in your root directory that could be grabbing everything?

bashy's avatar

Why not just do an alias in Apache to make the project folder direct to the Laravel public folder?

500 error is probably from the htaccess stuff you've put in.

unlikenesses's avatar

@Snapey : There's no .htaccess file in the root. I'm pretty new to Laravel so don't know where to look for a crash dump.

@bashy : Do you mean put the public folder back in with the rest of the core and create an alias? I could do... not sure how flexible Fasthosts is on doing things like that... I'd say the 500 error is definitely from the .htaccess stuff, but my .htaccess stuff is the default Laravel file (with the odd modification added, removed, ad infinitum). In theory it should work, but I am new to Laravel so could be missing something obvious.

Please or to participate in this conversation.